Abstract

This application is intended for creating and managing X.509 certificates, certificate requests, RSA, DSA and EC private keys, Smart-cards and CRLs. Everything that is needed for a CA is implemented. All CAs can sign sub-CAs recursively. These certificate chains are shown clearly. For an easy company-wide use there are customisable templates that can be used for certificate or request generation. All cryptographic data is stored in a SQL database. SQLite, MySQL (MariaDB), PostgreSQL and MicrosoftSQL (ODBC) databases are supported.

Introduction

This application is intended as certificate- and key-store and as signing application issuing certificates.

All data structures (Keys, Certificate signing requests, Certificates and Templates) can be imported and exported in several formats like DER or PEM. Import means reading a file from the filesystem and storing the data structure into the database file, while exporting means to write the data structure from the database file to the filesystem to be imported into an other application.

When opening a new database the first time, it needs a password to encrypt the private keys in the database. This is the default password. Every time this database is opened the application asks for the password. This input dialog may be canceled and the database is still opened successfully. However, the access to the keys is not possible without supplying the correct database password every time a key is used.

When setting an empty password, XCA will never ask again for a password when opening this database. This can be useful when playing around with test certificates or if all private keys are on security tokens.

The database password can be changed by the Menu item Extra->Change DataBase password

The different cryptographic parts are divided over 5 Tabs:

Keys, Requests, Certificates, Templates and Revocation lists.

All items can be manipulated either by a context menu available by right-clicking on the item, or by using the buttons at the right border. Every item is identified by an internal name which is always shown in the first column as long as the columns are not reordered by the user.

File Formats

There are several default file formats to exchange cryptographic data with other applications.

DERDistinguished Encoding Rules

is the binary ASN.1 encoding of the data.

PEMPrivacy Enhanced Mail

is the base64 encoded version of the DER formated data with additional header and footer lines to be transported via e.g. E-mail.

PKCS#XPublic Key Cryptography Standards

published by https://www.rsa.com